Wendy Lesser

Wendy Lesser.

Wendy Lesser (born 1952) is an American critic, writer, and editor based in Berkeley, California. She is the founding editor of the arts journal The Threepenny Review, and the author of a novel and several works of nonfiction, including most recently a biography of the architect Louis Kahn.

Biography

Lesser was born in 1952 in Santa Monica, California and moved in 1955 to Palo Alto, California, where she was raised. She is the daughter of Murray Lesser, an engineer and writer, and Millicent Dillon, a writer. She earned a B.A. at Radcliffe College in 1973; an M.A. at King's College, Cambridge, in 1973; and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982.

She is the author of several books, including a novel, The Pagoda in the Garden (Other Press, 2005), and the nonfiction book Why I Read (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dedalus Foundation, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among other places.

Works

• The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History (1987)
• His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art (1991)
• Pictures at an Execution (1994)
• A Director Calls (1997)
• The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters (1999)
  • Портрет балерины (Tamara Toumanova)[1]
• Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (2002)
• The Pagoda in the Garden (2005)
• Room for Doubt (2007)
• Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets (2011)
• Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (2014)
• You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (2017)

External links

• Other Press
• The Threepenny Review
• Freeze framed: Wendy Lesser's essays break emotional ice, review of Room for Doubt by Emily Weinstein at The Village Voice
• Random House: Wendy Lesser
• Films42 feature: Wendy Lesser